The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, has not sent any messages out on his Twitter account since December 31, 2017. A look through Assange's Twitter feed shows that he has consistently sent multiple messages and retweets almost every day, yet since the last one on Dec. 31st, which consisted of a cryptic code of letters and numbers along with a music video titled "M.I.A. - Paper Planes, his account has been inactive. (Related ANP article by Stefan Stanford here)
It is curious that since Assange's cryptic tweet highlighting the M.I.A. - Paper Planes song, he himself has gone missing in action.
Assange was at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden to avoid rape charges, which have since been dropped, and to avoid possible extradition to the U.S. where there has been a years-long grand jury inquiry after releasing thousands of highly classified documents leaked to Wikileaks by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
FLASHBACK: In August 2017, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher met with Assange for a three hour gathering at the Ecuadorian Embassy where a portion of their discussion included the Wikileaks DNC email release during the 2016 presidential election season which roiled the DNC and the Clinton campaign. After the meeting with Assange, Rohrabacher left the meeting stating he had information to share privately with President Trump, stating "Julian also indicated that he is open to further discussions regarding specific information about the DNC email incident that is currently unknown to the public."
Rohrabacher later indicated he was attempting to set up a meeting with President Trump to deliver the message from Assange, with Rohrabacher stating "I’m trying to get this out in the public now where we can get this Julian Assange thing straightened out so that people know that it wasn’t the Russians that hacked into the system, and that’s not how this information was released," according to The Washington Times.
Rohrabacher has been attempting to get a preemptive pardon for Julian Assange.
WILL PRESIDENT TRUMP PREEMPTIVELY PARDON JULIAN ASSANGE?
A number of events have occurred over the last year, the most recent causing rampant speculation over whether Assange will get preemptively pardoned, and as to whether Assange will finally reveal what he knows about the DNC staffer, Seth Rich, who was murdered in July 2016, amidst the election cycle, less than two weeks before Wikileaks started publishing the DNC email trove. Assange had previously indicated that Rich was a "whistleblower," and Wikileaks had offered a $20K reward for information regarding Rich's murder.
“WikiLeaks is a media organization which publishes and comments upon censored or restricted official materials involving war, surveillance or corruption, which are leaked to it in a variety of different circumstances,” the London First-tier Tribunal declared in a ruling published Thursday by Italy’s la Repubblica newspaper.
Then on December 29, 2017, it was noted that the counsel for Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. seemed to make a solid case for freeing Julian Assange.
The motion, filed on December 29, was in response to a lawsuit by two Democratic Party donors who allege that the Trump campaign and former adviser Roger Stone conspired with Russians to publish the leaked Democratic National Committee emails. The outlandish lawsuit, based largely on conspiracy theories, was orchestrated by a group called Protect Democracy — which happens to be run by former attorneys from the Obama administration.
In defense of the Trump campaign, the 32-page filing by Michael A. Carvin argues that the publishing of the DNC leak passes both aspects of the Bartnicki First Amendment Test.
The first part of the case law is that a defendant may not be held liable for a disclosure of stolen information if it deals with “a matter of public concern.”
Addressing this portion, Carvin’s filing asserts that there can be “no serious doubt” that the disclosures from WikiLeaks satisfied the “newsworthy” and “public concern” portion of the test.
The motion argues that ‘”punishing truthful publication in the name of privacy’ is always an ‘extraordinary measure’ — doubly so when the publisher did nothing illegal in obtaining the information.”
GP also highlights a snarky tweet by Wikileaks sent on January 2, 2018, where Wikileaks states "US government on why it has decided to close its eight year long grand jury proceedings against @WikiLeaks (expanded in 2017 to cover our series on the CIA). Wait, what?" That tweet also included a 22 second video clip from the Department of State's verified Twitter account, along with the message "We support a freedom of the press. When a nation clamps down on social media, we ask the question — what are you afraid of? We support the people of #Iran, and we support their voices being heard." In that clip the spokeswoman says "When a nation clamps down on social media, or websites, or Google… or news sites… we ask the question, what are you afraid of?”
Wikileaks appears to be calling out the double standard of the U.S. "clamping down" by persecuting Wikileaks and Assange, while arguing that Iran should not be silencing truth.
Seth Rich and proving that Julian Assange/Wikileaks did not obtain their DNC emails as a result of Russian "hacking," but rather from an inside "leak," perhaps by Seth Rich, as Assange has said on multiple occasions the leaked emails did not come from Russian sources, is only one possibility as to what the U.S. could get from preemptively pardoning Julian Assange.
As Wikileaks highlighted on January 7, 2018, Assange could be very helpful in helping to expose more corruption and deep state members within the intelligence community as they spotlight a 2016 interview with an Icelandic Minister that accuses Robert Mueller, who is now special counsel in charge of the Russian collusion investigation, of attempting to "frame Julian Assange and Wikileaks," when Mueller was director of the FBI in 2011:
You are “the minister” who refused to cooperate with the FBI because you suspected their agents on mission in Iceland were trying to frame Julian Assange. Do you confirm this?
Yes. What happened was that in June 2011, US authorities made some approaches to us indicating they had knowledge of hackers wanting to destroy software systems in Iceland. I was a minister at the time. They offered help. I was suspicious, well aware that a helping hand might easily become a manipulating hand!
Later in the summer, in August, they sent a planeload of FBI agents to Iceland seeking our cooperation in what I understood as an operation set up to frame Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Since they had not been authorised by the Icelandic authorities to carry out police work in Iceland and since a crack-down on WikiLeaks was not on my agenda, to say the least, I ordered that all cooperation with them be promptly terminated and I also made it clear that they should cease all activities in Iceland immediately.
It was also made clear to them that they were to leave the country. They were unable to get permission to operate in Iceland as police agents, but I believe they went to other countries, at least to Denmark. I also made it clear at the time that if I had to take sides with either WikiLeaks or the FBI or CIA, I would have no difficulty in choosing: I would be on the side of WikiLeaks.
It appears that Julian Assange and Wikileaks has information that could be very helpful to the United States as well as damaging to the credibility of Mueller, and exposing other high level deep state members, which is all the more reason why President Trump could, and some argue should, preemptively pardon Julian Assange.
American author and political commentator Jerome Corsi makes a persuasive argument that a pardon may just be in the works.
BOTTOM LINE - EXIT QUESTIONS
Since being a virtual prisoner inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange really hasn't had much to do other than to communicate via Twitter with the outside world, yet for the last eight days, since his mysterious M.I.A. - Paper Planes tweet, there has been no activity on his account. Was the song itself a hint? Was the code a dead man's switch to go out in the event that something happened to him or a message letting those "in the know" that he would be MIA for a little while?
Just imagine the utter panic within the deep state if Assange is able to provide indisputable evidence that Russia was not behind the DNC emails Wikileaks released in July 2016.
Below is the video Assange tweeted out the last time he communicated with the public.
